American Elephants

Liberals, Progressives, Statists under whatever name, always seem to speak from the same playbook. They use the same words; one must presume they think the same things; they hate Conservatives and Republicans and especially the Tea Party, but their hatred seems so confused. They celebrated the “Occupy” movement as noble opposition to the Tea Party, yet Tea party people were groups of ordinary citizens alarmed by government spending and the tripling of the national debt under Obama. Peaceful, clean, orderly, they must have frightened the Left inordinately since visible protest was assumed to be characteristic of Democrats, not their opposition.

Politics. for Progressives. is a religion. Everything is political and the political is everything. Yet the world around them changes, and nobody notices. For decades, the nation has been deadlocked over America’s limited natural resources, the environment, the pristine Alaskan wilderness. As Kim Strassel noted in the Wall Street Journal, it has been an argument about scarcity, decline, depletion and want.

Newt Gingrich, who always notes the new big ideas, is trying to bring it to national attention. The decline is over, passé, done. America and the world are embarking on a seismic energy shift. America is rich in resources; oil and gas and coal are abundant. We are resource rich and ready to embark as the largest energy producer in the world, with all the money, jobs and benefits that come with it.

The shift could create millions of new jobs, a new cash stream to the government, a heartland argument since abundant, cheap energy is the way to enrich and expand our manufacturing base.

Mr. Obama is already shamelessly taking credit for the increase in energy production on private land (that he has nothing to do with), to offset his major theme of a fantasy green energy that will — someday and under government mandates — reduce our “addiction” to foreign oil. Government is the answer, and Obama will mold us into obedient consumers of his preferred energy sources.  It’s just that they keep going out of business.

State after state has required of their utilities that they purchase enough alternative energy to produce the percentage of energy specified by the legislature, and state after state has failed to meet those goals. Wind and solar are old, old technologies.

Modern turbines are ever so huge and impressive, towering to stretch for some place in the air where the wind blows consistently and the turbines can spin as their “capacity” promised. But they are chasing the wrong solution. The problem is in the nature of the wind, and the nature of sunlight. The wind is too intermittent and seldom produces more than 20% of “capacity”, and the sun is too diffuse and sinks beneath the horizon just when it gets dark and people need light.

But Obama has the answer. He will bring down high gas prices by attacking the oil companies. He will raise their tax bills, and use a little class warfare to rile up the proles. “Every time you fill up the gas tank, they’re making money” was the applause line from the president’s speech in Nashua, N.H. Resent the rich oil companies, ask your congressman to end the reasonable oil-and-gas industry tax deductions for drilling costs and the technical aspects of production. Is the suggestion then that oil companies should not make a profit? How else does Obama expect them to finance the search for oil, the dry holes, the court battles with environmentalists. There are large numbers of people who assume that business should do things for free. It’s an ugly way of doing politics.

Yet the president who insists that he is doing everything he can to bring down the cost of oil; is instead trying to raise the price of oil to force acceptance of his fantasy of green energy. The rhetoric does not match the actions. But then it never did.